Clarissa's Blog

One day after a Pew poll showed only 38 percent of Germans

view Russia as a threat to its neighbors (other than Ukraine), news has broken that Russia hacked the Bundestag.

Objective reality doesn’t go away even if we close our eyes and hide under the sofa.

Writers are, first and foremost, readers. They read a lot and as a result know what has been done so many times that doing it once again would be a horrible cliché.

To give just an example, a contemporary writer starts a famous novel as follows. The main character’s mother died when he was an infant. So there was nobody to “raise him in tenderness” and he grew up wild. Because all women are tender, obviously. And without their civilizing presence men remain wild. But that’s OK because the character had a special talent he discovered at the age of 7. And now let me cover thousands of pages with words to tell you all the details of that special talent.

Without even starting on the artistic qualities, just the plot premise itself is excruciatingly boring. “Orphaned and wild” has been done so many times that one begins to wish for an orphaned and domesticated character just to relieve the tedium. The special gift one discovers all of a sudden serves as a foundation for every TV show featuring children or adolescents.

Everything turns to a parody of itself with repeated use. Wild motherless orphans made sense in the early 19th century. The need for women to civilize men by applying their “softer” influence to them was all the rage in the 1500s. Golden locks and rosebud mouths sounded just fine in the 17th century. Eos of the rosy fingers worked out fantastic for Homer but you just can’t do this shit without a trace of irony in the postmodern era and still be a writer.

This is not to say that the cheap pop psych of dead mothers, softening women, and sudden talents can’t be entertaining as hell. Just like an occasional meal at Wendy’s might be fun and delicious. Yet a person who sees no difference between a dish prepared by a Michelin-star chef and an outing at Applebee’s is missing many exciting experiences that constitute culinary education. And in the same way, the person who believes that literature is Hunger Games and 50 Shades has had an impoverished range of intellectual and artistic experiences.

What I’m expressing here is a point of view that is hugely unpopular in North American academia. We are all so terrified of rating or ranking and so into the idea of total equality that we spent months last year at my department  interviewing people for a job they were not even remotely qualified to do just because it would be unfair not to interview everybody who NEEDED a job.

But hey, when did I care what anybody else thought? The literary canon was created to prop up the nation-state. And now that the nation-state is tottering, preserving the idea of Great Books might offer some support to the nation-state. 

I just discovered that I’m not at all bad at analyzing poetry. If the enjoyment of the activity is any sort of an indicator (and with me it usually is), then I might actually be quite good.

I always thought I’d suck at poetry, so I never tried it. But a book titled Literature of the Crisis would look freaky if it pointedly excluded poetry just because I’m scared of it.

So I started analyzing a poem, and it turns out I have a lot to say about it. And I recognize the poems this poet makes use of because it turns out I have read quite a lot of poetry and am not as unprepared as I thought I was to analyze it. 

I blame my teachers for this terror of poetry that I used to feel. They made me believe that analyzing poetry was too hard and too useless and not to be attempted. It turns out, however, that if you really love a poem (and have had training in literary analysis), you will be able to say quite a lot about it. 

This whole awakening to poetry is a result of my interactions with one of my students. He’s been analyzing poetry in every essay he ever handed in to me and was doing a kick-ass job. And as I was discussing his work with him, I kind of got into the whole thing and decided to continue it on my own. I’m just happy that I didn’t turn out to be one of those professors who imbue students with the fear of poetry. I mean, I almost did but this student resisted me. And I’m very happy he did.

OK, I’ll stop gushing now and go analyze me some more poetry.

In 1902, the great historian Theodor Mommsen was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. At that time, everybody knew that the writing of history is just as creative and fictional as the production of novels or poetry.

OK, why is my Walter Scott post trending all of a sudden?  It has all of six words or so in it. Has there been a new development in the story?

Among all of the garbage written about Caitlyn Jenner, there is a piece that is not worthless. Strangely, it has been published in the NYTimes. Fell free to read the article in question here but I just want to comment on the closing paragraph:

Bruce Jenner told Ms. Sawyer that what he looked forward to most in his transition was the chance to wear nail polish, not for a furtive, fugitive instant, but until it chips off. I want that for Bruce, now Caitlyn, too. But I also want her to remember: Nail polish does not a woman make.

That’s precisely the thing: there is no there there. There is no uniform experience that all women share and that all men don’t. Searching for such an experience leads people in the crazy direction of equating womanhood with nail polish. 

In reality, there is no gender experience that cannot be turned around completely by age, social class, financial status, culture, religion, profession, intellect, and a million other factors. Jenner’s vision of womanhood is that of a very rich, pampered, and frankly stupid person. And that’s precisely the perfect test of how far one is ready to go in defending the right to self-determination. It’s easy to defend the rights of the smart, profound, interesting, or truly victimized. But the rich, brain-dead airheads are human, too, and as onerous as it is to stand up for them, we should remember that the hard work of respecting the basic humanity of others has to be done even when the others do everything to avoid evoking respect.

So we have migrated to outlook.office365.com and it’s an absolute freeping disaster. The interface is absolutely ridiculous. Everything bleeds into everything else in the streams of white color. I chose the most clearly defined interface, and this is what it looks like:

If I want to delete an email, it’s a whole process because there is no visible box next to the email to click. And the Delete button is located in a faraway and counterintuitive place. All of my folders have been destroyed, of course. And I have a filing system that is very much based on folders. 

Plus, the website takes forever to open. There is literally no upside to this switch. We keep futzing with our university email every couple of years, and every change has been massively worse than whatever preceded it.

Putin has been freaked out by the unanimous rejection of his actions by the G7 and is now trying to suck up to Italy in hopes of splintering it away from the countries that condemn Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Being kicked out of the G8 has been an enormous blow to Putin. The little weasel hoped to rule the group by now, and the invasion of Ukraine was going to help him do that. Obviously, that’s not how things work but it’s not like he’s known for great insight or a sophisticated understanding of international politics.

Apparently, another round of “history wars” is underway as historians battle politicians over the right to define how history will be taught in US high schools.

All I can say is that there is something deeply wrong with the way history is taught to high-schoolers. My students this year were extremely vague on the Vietnam War. And I mean vague to the point of not knowing who fought whom and for what reason. The US involvement was barely on their radar.

I don’t think I need to tell anybody on this blog why it’s absolutely crucial to know about Vietnam. But I have no space in my syllabus for it. I already have enough with needing to break the news that Hitler ‘ s been dead since 1945.

History is the most ideological of disciplines but if someone at least tried to get the students learn some basic facts, that’d help.